by Jane Yolen
The little bird watched a fissure open beneath the king’s throne. It grew wider, quickly including the king himself. Without a sound, the king and throne cracked into two uneven pieces. The king was torn between his legs and across the right side of his face. From within the broken parts a smell of soured wine arose.
The bird flew down. It pulled a single white hair from the king’s mustache, hovered a moment, then winged out of the window. Round and round the kingdom it flew, looking for a place to nest, a place to build another tower and lay another egg. Perhaps the king that grew from the next egg would be a more solid piece of work.
The Face in the Cloth
THERE WAS ONCE A king and queen so in love with one another that they could not bear to be parted, even for a day. To seal their bond, they desperately wanted a child. The king had even made a cradle of oak for the babe with his own hands and placed it by their great canopied bed. But year in and year out the cradle stood empty.
At last one night, when the king was fast asleep, the queen left their bed. She cast one long, lingering glance at her husband, then, disguising herself with a shawl around her head, she crept out of the castle, for the first time alone. She was bound for a nearby forest where she had heard three witch-sisters lived. The queen had been told that they might give her what she most desired by taking from her what she least desired to give.
“But I have so much,” she thought as she ran through the woods. “Gold and jewels beyond counting. Even the diamond which the king himself put on my hand and from which I would hate to be parted. But though it is probably what I would least desire to give, I would give it gladly to have a child.”
The witchs’ hut squatted in the middle of the wood and through its window the queen saw the three old sisters sitting by the fire, chanting a spell as soft as a cradle song:
Needle and scissors,
Scissors and pins,
where one life ends,
Another begins.
And suiting their actions to the words, the three snipped and sewed, snipped and sewed with invisible thread over and over and over again.
The night was so dark and the three slouching sisters so strange that the queen was quite terrified. But her need was even greater than her fear. She scratched upon the window and the three looked up from their work.
“Come in,” they called out in a single voice.
So she had to go, pulled into the hut by that invisible thread.
“What do you want, my dear?” said the first old sister to the queen through the pins she held in her mouth.
“I want a child,” said the queen.
“When do you want it?” asked the second sister, who held a needle high above her head.
“As soon as I can get it,” said the queen, more boldly now.
“And what will you give for it?” asked the third, snipping her scissors ominously.
“Whatever is needed,” replied the queen. Nervously, she turned the ring with the diamond around her finger.
The three witches smiled at one another. Then they each held up a hand with the thumb and forefinger touching in a circle.
“Go,” they said. “It is done. All we ask is to be at the birthing to sew the swaddling cloth.”
The queen stood still as stone, a river of feelings washing around her. She had been prepared to gift them a fortune. What they asked was so simple, she agreed at once. Then she turned and ran out of the hut all the way to the castle. She never looked back.
Less than a year later the queen was brought to childbed. But in her great joy she forgot to mention her promise to the king. And then in her great pain, and because it had been such a small promise after all, she forgot it altogether.
As the queen lay in labor in her canopied bed, there came a knock on the castle door. When the guards opened it, who should be standing there but three slouching old women.
“We have come to be with the queen,” said the one with pins in her mouth.
The guards shook their heads.
“The queen promised we could make the swaddling cloth,” said the second, holding her needle high over her head.
“We must be by her side,” said the third, snapping her scissors.
One guard was sent to tell the king.
The king came to the castle door, his face red with anger, his brow wreathed with sweat.
“The queen told me of no such promise,” he said. “And she tells me everything. What possesses you to bother a man at a time like this? Be gone.” He dismissed them with a wave of his hand.
But before the guards could shut the door upon the ancient sisters, the one with the scissors called out: “Beware, oh king, of promises given.”
Then all three chanted:
Needle and scissors,
Scissors and pins,
Where one life ends.
Another begins.
The second old woman put her hands above her head and made a circle with her forefinger and thumb. But the one with the pins in her mouth thrust a piece of cloth into the king’s hand.
“It is for the babe,” she said. “Because of the queen’s desire.”
Then the three left the castle and were not seen there again.
The king started to look down at the cloth, but there came a loud cry from the bed chamber. He ran back, along the corridors, and when he entered the bedroom door the doctor turned around, a newborn child still red with birthblood in his hands.
“It is a girl, sire,” he said.
There was a murmur of praise from the attending women.
The king put out his hands to receive the child and, for the first time, really noticed the cloth he was holding. It was pure white, edged with lace. As he looked at it, his wife’s likeness began to appear on it slowly as if being stitched in with a crimson thread. First the eyes he so loved, then the elegant nose, the soft, full mouth, the dimpled chin.
The king was about to remark on it when the midwife cried out. “It is the queen, sire. She is dead.” And at the same moment, the doctor put the child into his hands.
The royal funeral and the royal christening were held on the same day and no one in the kingdom knew whether to laugh or cry except the babe, who did both.
Since the king could not bear to part with his wife entirely, he had the lace-edged cloth with her likeness sewn into the baby’s cloak so that wherever she went, the princess carried her mother’s face.
As she outgrew one cloak, the white lace cloth was cut away from the old and sewn into the new. And in this way the princess was never without the panel bearing her mother’s portrait nor was she ever allowed to wander far from her father’s watchful eyes. Her life was measured by the size of the cloaks, which were cut bigger each year, and the likeness of her mother, which seemed to get bigger as well.
The princess grew taller but she did not grow stronger. She was like a pale copy of her mother. There was never a time that the bloom of health sat on her cheeks. She remained the color of skimmed milk, the color of ocean foam, the color of second-day snow. She was always cold, sitting huddled for warmth inside her picture cloak even on the hottest days, and nothing could part her from it.
The king despaired of his daughter’s health, but neither the royal physicians nor the royal philosophers could help. He turned to necromancers and star-gazers, to herbalists and diviners. They pushed and prodded and prayed over the princess. They examined the soles of her feet and the movement of her stars. But still she sat cold and whey-colored, wrapped in her cloak.
At last one night, when everyone was fast asleep, the king left his bed and crept out of the castle alone. He had heard that there were three witch sisters who lived nearby who might give him what he most desired by taking from him what he least desired to give. Having lost his queen, he knew there was nothing else he would hate losing, not his fortune, his kingdom, or his throne. He would give it all up gladly to see his daughter, who was his wife’s pale reflection, sing and dance and run.
The witchs’ hut s
quatted in the middle of the wood and through its window the king saw the three old sisters. He did not recognize them but they knew him at once.
“Come in, come in,” they called out, though he had not knocked. And he was drawn into the hut as if pulled by an invisible thread.
“We know what you want,” said the first.
“We can give you what you most desire,” said the second.
“By taking what you least wish to give,” said the third.
“I have already lost my queen,” he said. “So anything else I have is yours so long as my daughter is granted a measure of health.” And he started to twist off the ring he wore on his third finger, the ring his wife had been pledged with, to give to the three sisters to seal his part of the bargain.
“Then you must give us—your daughter,” said the three.
The king was stunned. For a moment the only sound in the hut was the crackle of fire in the hearth.
“Never!” he thundered at last. “What you ask is impossible.”
“What you ask is impossible,” said the first old woman. “Nonetheless we promise it will be so.” She stood. “But if your daughter does not come to us, her life will be worth no more than this.” She took a pin from her mouth and held it up. It caught the firelight for a moment. Only a moment.
The king stared. “I know you,” he said slowly. “I have seen you before.”
The second sister nodded. “Our lives have been sewn together by a queen’s desire,” she said. She pulled the needle through a piece of cloth she was holding and drew the thread through in a slow, measured stitch.
The third sister began to chant, and at each beat her scissors snapped together:
Needle and scissors,
Scissors and pins,
Where one life ends,
Another begins.
The king cursed them thoroughly, his words hoarse as a rote of war, and left. But partway through the forest, he thought of his daughter like a waning moon asleep in her bed, and wept.
For days he raged in the palace and his courtiers felt his tongue as painfully as if it were a whip. Even his daughter, usually silent in her shroudlike cloak, cried out.
“Father,” she said, “your anger unravels the kingdom, pulling at its loosest threads. What is it? What can I do?” As she spoke, she pulled the cloak more firmly about her shoulders and the king could swear that the portrait of his wife moved, the lips opening and closing as if the image spoke as well.
The king shook his head and put his hands to his face. “You are all I have left of her,” he mumbled. “And now I must let you go.”
The princess did not understand, but she put her small faded hands on his. “You must do what you must do, my father,” she said.
And though he did not quite understand the why of it, the king brought his daughter into the wood the next night after dark. Setting her on his horse and holding the bridle himself, he led her along the path to the hut of the three crones.
At the door he kissed her once on each cheek and then tenderly kissed the image on her cloak. Then, mounting his horse, he galloped away without once looking back.
Behind him, the briars closed over the path and the forest was still.
Once her father had left, the princess looked around the dark clearing. When no one came to fetch her, she knocked upon the door of the little hut. Getting no answer, she pushed the door open and went in.
The hut was empty, though a fire burned merrily in the hearth. The table was set and beside the wooden plate were three objects: a needle, a scissors, and a pin. On the hearth wall, engraved in the stone, was a poem. The princess went over to the fire to read it:
Needle and scissors.
Scissors and pins,
Where one life ends
Another begins.
“How strange,” thought the princess, shivering inside her cloak.
She looked around the little hut, found a bed with a wooden headboard shaped like a loom, lay down upon the bed and, pulling the cloak around her even more tightly, slept.
In the morning when the princess woke, she was still alone, but there was food on the table, steaming hot. She rose and made a feeble toilette, for there were no mirrors on the wall, and ate the food. All the while, she toyed with the needle, scissors, and pin by her plate. She longed for her father and the familiarity of the court, but her father had left her at the hut and, being an obedient child, she stayed.
As she finished her meal, the hearthfire went out and soon the hut grew chilly. So the princess went outside and sat on a wooden bench by the door. Sunlight illuminated the clearing and wrapped around her shoulders like a golden cloak. Alternately she dozed and woke and dozed again until it grew dark.
When she went inside the hut, the table was once more set with food and this time she ate eagerly, then went to sleep, dreaming of the needle and scissors and pin. In her dream they danced away from her, refusing to bow when she bade them. She woke to a cold dawn.
The meal was ready and the smell of it, threading through the hut, got her up. She wondered briefly what hands had done all the work but, being a princess and used to being served, she did not wonder about it very long.
When she went outside to sit in the sun, she sang snatches of old songs to keep herself company. The sound of her own voice, tentative and slightly off key, was like an old friend. One tune kept running around and around in her head and though she did not know where she had heard it before, it fitted perfectly the words carved over the hearth:
Needle and scissors,
Scissors and pins.
Where one life ends
Another begins.
“That is certainly true,” she told herself, “for my life here in the forest is different than my life in the castle, though I myself do not feel changed.” And she shivered and pulled the cloak around her.
Several times she stood and walked about the clearing, looking for the path that led out. But it was gone. The brambles were laced firmly together like stitches on a quilt, and when she put a hand to them, a thorn pierced her palm and the blood dripped down onto her cloak, spotting the portrait of her mother and making it look as if she were crying red tears.
It was then the princess knew that she had been abandoned to the magic in the forest. She wondered that she was not more afraid and tried out different emotions: first fear, then bewilderment, then loneliness, but none of them seemed quite real to her. What she felt, she decided at last, was a kind of lightness, a giddiness, as if she had lost her center, as if she were a balloon, untethered and ready—at last—to let go.
“What a goose I have become,” she said aloud. “One or two days without the prattle of courtiers and I am talking to myself.”
But her own voice was a comfort and she smiled. Then, settling her cloak more firmly about her shoulders, she went back to the hut.
She counted the meager furnishings of the hut as if she were telling beads on a string: door, window, hearth, table, chair, bed. “I wish there were something to do,” she thought to herself. And as she turned around, the needle on the table was glowing as if a bit of fire had caught in its eye.
She went over to the table and picked up the needle, scissors, and pin and carried them to the hearth. Spreading her cloak on the stones, though careful to keep her mother’s image facing up, she sat.
“If I just had some thread,” she though.
Just then she noticed the panel with her mother’s portrait. For the first time it seemed small and crowded, spotted from the years. The curls were old-fashioned and overwrought, the mouth a little slack, the chin a touch weak.
“Perhaps if I could borrow a bit of thread from this embroidery,” she whispered, “just a bit where it will not be noticed. As I am alone, no one will know but me.
Slowly she began to pick out the crimson thread along one of the tiny curls. She heard a deep sigh as she started as if it came from the cloak, then realized it had been her own breath that had made the sound. She wound up the thr
ead around the pin until she had quite a lot of it. Then she snipped off the end, knotted it, threaded the needle—and stopped.
“What am I to sew upon?” she wondered. All she had was what she wore. Still, as she had a great need to keep herself busy and nothing else to do, she decided to embroider designs along the edges of her cloak. So she began with what she knew. On the gray panels she sewed a picture of her own castle. It was so real, it seemed as if its banners fluttered in a westerly wind. And as it grew, turret by turret, she began to feel a little warmer, a little more at home.
She worked until it was time to eat but, as she had been in the hut all the while, no magical servants had set the table. So she hunted around the cupboards herself until she found bread and cheese and a pitcher of milk. Making herself a scanty meal, she cleaned away the dishes, then lay down on the bed and was soon asleep.
In the morning she was up with the dawn. She cut herself some bread, poured some milk, and took the meal outside where she continued to sew. She gave the castle lancet windows, a Lady Chapel, cows grazing in the outlying fields, and a moat in which golden carp swam about, their fins stroking the water and making little waves that moved beneath her hand.
When the first bit of thread was used up, she picked out another section of the portrait, all of the curls and a part of the chin. With that thread she embroidered a forest around the castle, where brachet hounds, noses close to the ground, sought a scent; a deer started; and a fox lay hidden in a rambling thicket, its ears twitching as the dogs coursed by. She could almost remark their baying, now near, now far away. Then, in the middle of the forest—with a third piece of thread—the princess sewed the hut. Beneath the hut, as she sewed, letters appeared though she did not touch them.
Needle and scissors,
Scissors and pins,
Where one life ends
Another begins.
She said the words aloud and, as she spoke, puffs of smoke appeared above the embroidered chimney in the hut. It reminded her that it was time to eat.
Stretching, she stood and went into the little house. The bread was gone. She searched the cupboards and could find no more, but there was flour and salt and so she made herself some flat cakes which she baked in an oven that was set into the stone of the fireplace. She knew that the smoke from her baking was sending soft clouds above the hut.
